> how often do you ask an engineer to do something they've already done? The beauty of software, is that you don't solve the same problem over and over, because if you did, you'd automate it

I heard someone summarize this as saying, a surgeon may perform the same surgery over and over for decades, while if a programmer does something more than a few times, it becomes an app (or library, etc).

In a sense, unless we are building the same thing we've built before, we are, by definition, always operating at the limit of our abilities.

That's a narrow view of what surgery entails and also a grand interpretation of what professional programming actually looks like.